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Waiting for Your Cat to Bark?
Book

Waiting for Your Cat to Bark?

Persuading Customers When They Ignore Marketing

HarperCollins Leadership, 2006 more...

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Editorial Rating

7

Qualities

  • Applicable

Recommendation

You live in a new multimedia world. Customers call the tune, and marketers need to know how to make them dance. Techno-savvy, web-savvy and advertising-savvy consumers know all about your marketing methods and consider themselves immune. You must cajole, persuade and seduce them into hearing your message and wanting your product. Marketing experts Bryan and Jeffrey Eisenberg, writing with Lisa T. Davis, have learned to understand and translate this new marketing paradigm, calling it “Persuasion Architecture.” In their straightforward and anecdotal, if jargony, book – a standard that is slightly showing its age – they provide the overview, principles, strategy and techniques you need to find, attract and keep the right customers. getAbstract recommends this informative guide to marketers and salespeople seeking solid backgrounding.

Summary

“Permanent Change” in the Market

Customers used to be dogs – ring the bell, wave the treat and they’d come running. No longer. Consumers have become cats. They want what they want when they want it. And if they’re not sure they want it, you have to convince them. More and more ads, websites and choices now compete for consumers’ attention. In this atmosphere, firms can’t rely just on branding alone. Brands used to suggest large, amorphous but understandable concepts. For instance, showing a rugged cowboy on horseback conveyed the nature of a certain cigarette. Now a brand is only each buyer’s “personal experiences with a particular product or service.” Consumer interaction holds all the brand’s meaning. Supplying new awareness about your product is no longer enough. Now, you must cajole cats and “celebrate meows.”

The “Persuasion Architecture” process is the way to accomplish that goal. It begins with developing a “persona” for your targeted customer and proceeds through framing a story about the product to reach that persona, making prototypes of your promotional pieces, developing and using those materials, and monitoring your sales results. Persuasion architecture...

About the Authors

Bryan Eisenberg and Jeffrey Eisenberg, co-founders of Future Now, Inc., wrote Call to Action. They co-wrote Persuasive Online Copywriting with Lisa T. Davis, Future Now’s content director and the author of GrokDotCom.


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